I've decided to keep track of the changes I make to Haiku News, in the form of a changelog, and todo list.
With that in mind, feel free to check here from time to time to see how I'm doing. I have a lot of plans, but without
good documentation, it's hard to keep it straight in the head, unless you're slightly insane.
v1.9.2 (11 august 2005)
- Adjusted the left galley width so pullboxes have more room for their content. Was 205px and is now 225px.
- Modified the printer and text icons so they are no longer transparent png, but on white background color. Internet Exploder now displays them properly.
- Re-factored the DisplayNews() code so that entries with multiple pages now paginate and display a page navigator properly.
- Changed the >q< tag visual to display an indented, grey colored, left vertical bar with some margin and padding for the quoted text.
- Work goes (slowly) on the commenting system. User Preferences, login, logout, print mode, and more are fairly complete. Real Life issues eat my time. I wish I had more time for this. :(
v1.9.1 (21 april 2005)
- Removed the forums (several months previous) and started working on a commenting system that will be tied to the news articles.
- Added Text format view for articles.
- Changed all url formats from using ? to using / and all site services now follow this manner. This means an article URL is such: http://siteurl/1234, Print: http://siteurl/print/1234, Archive: http://siteurl/archive/2005, http://siteurl/archive/2005/07 (for instance, July) and so forth. Getting rid of the ugly ? $_GET variable string has helped make the site url clean and efficient, and now no longer exposes the internal API.
- Tweaked the colors slightly of the default "orange" theme so that things like pullboxes have a little more colorful blue background, the top gradient header background image blends well with the scheme, the pullboxes now have a small shadow effect by changing slightly the outer border bottom and right sides, and so on. Too many small tweaks to note, but these have been made generic enough so as replacement css them files can be chosen by viewers later.
- Added two new subsections to the Archive section: by Author and by Headline.
- Dropped the Search box down a touch to below the header breakline. Search box also goes away if user visits the Search page.
- Added an Article Tools side box for articles that are viewed alone, which shows possible viewing modes for the selected article, and presents some basic tracking statistics, in addition to viewing more of the author's past stories.
- Changed slightly the interface in the News Editor, using javascript and css to hide/show the less important fields.
- Fixed a date bug in the RDF feed that prevented it from being valid.
v1.9.0 (13 august 2004)
- Moved to a new webhost and completed transition of beosjournal.org to haikunews.org. New name is in effect. :)
- Squashed lots of bugs that came out of the wookwork, notably because the new server had an older version of php installed. (4.2.2 versus 4.3.7). This forced me to tighten my coding practices even further, which is not that bad, really.
- Started the basis of the user preferences system, and made the layout and css dynamically created based on internal php rules. These rules can then be saved as a user preference.
- Added a 'Popular News' corner box to the front newspage.
- Updated the forum general style to better blend in with the new look. The forum style will update itself based on the overall site style as chosen in the user preferences.
- Added two new sections; Resources and About, which will house theLinks, Guides, Media, and History, Sitemap, Staff, Tracker sub-sections, respectivelly.
v1.8.0 (1 june 2004)
- Added 'Related Items' feature to all news entries, displayed just below navigation links when viewing any news
entry. Also shown on the front page.
- Added a 'shown: ' counter to news entries, which reports the number of times the news entry has been shown on
the front page and alone. The alone count is automatically adjusted for news entries that have multiple pages using the
formula alone = ceil(viewed / num_pages).
- Modified more of the CSS to add a small border below the teaser when printed.
- Added and fixed a bug in the Linked URL's feature for the printer-friendly page.
- Fixed an output error in the text of emailed news entries that was sending raw HTML entities instead of plaintext
version.
- Added url location, word count, archive and related links to the search results.
- Removed printer and email icon from search results.
- Added keywords checker to Admin backend.
- Added RSS/RDF feed builder to Admin backend.
- Added statistics reporting for news entries to track Front Page, Alone, Printed and Emailed counts to Admin
backend.
- Added journalist activity reporting to Admin backend.
- Added Doxygen comments to 80% of the codebase.
v1.7.9 (21 march 2004)
- Added Email icon and service for news entries. Now you can spam your friends. ;)
- Added a Site Map.
- Tweaked the Printer Friendly icon slightly.
- Cleaned up the header and footer navigation bar, and added Search, and Site Map to it.
- Cleaned up the Archive section and added email icon to entries.
- Added Previous, Archive, and Next links to news entries when viewed singly.
- Added Keywords to the database schema for the news table. News entries will be able to link to other related
entries soon.
- Adjusted the CSS for all form input elements to look a little cleaner and be more accessibility friendly.
v1.7.8 (05 march 2004)
- Recovered from a stupid blunder on my part, and in the process learned that backups are your friend. ;)
- Started working on search keyword statistics modelling. This will eventually allow the search engine to learn what
news entries are more important for each keyword. Imagine a search engine that "learns".
- Added google text advertisments to the search results page(s). Here is to hoping they will be effective and people
will click on them to show their support.
- Moved the google text advertisments box on the front page up two positions, to make it slightly more visible.
Please help support this site. ;)
v1.7.7 (19 february 2004)
- Added keyword coloring for the search engine. Colors cycle through a 6color, 2hue rotation.
- Search results are stripped of any html format tags, to prevent orphaned or only-open html tags.
- The administration user section is shaping up nicely, with user management nearly complete. Can now modify, list,
and view statistics of journalists in the system. (recent, all, active, non-active, percentage, etc)
- Added a file manager to the administration backend for editing any document on the site.
- Added an .htaccess user/password manager to the administration backend.
- Cleaned up the Error 404 handler, added a search box, and contact information. Additionally the handler now tracks
and reports missing or malformed URL's and/or haxoring attempts. (re: FormMail.pl script attempts. Stupid haxors.
;)
- Implemented user level permissions in the administration backend. Journalists are now not able to edit other
journalists entries, unless given specific additional permissions. Same goes for deletion, moving, or related
options.
v1.7.6 (09 february 2004)
- Added a search engine based on how Google behaves. Expect more features for
this later.
- Moved the links section from the sidebar to a separate links page and renamed home to News in the navigation menu.
The links section is based on BeForever.com's portal page, no longer available.
- Added advertising space for google text ads, only visible to browsers that support javascript unfortunately.
- Installed the Gallery package for BeScreens, BeFAQS, Contest
entries, etc. (Gallery software works well, but still needs to work in Net+ and fit the site theme.)
- Navigation menus are now dynamic, and look a lot better than previous css attempt. (what was I thinking?)
- Added what will be the user section in admin
- Adjusted the css of the news entry div tags.
- Added a 'show all posts since last visit' feature to the forum.
- Adjusted the printer and glyph icons to have a transparent outline.
v1.7.5 (23 october 2003 -- v1.7.5
- Took out all references to target="_blank" in links from tbj to third party sites. (except those in
articles.)
- Found another small bug; was using 'g' instead of 'G' for gmdate() in displaying article posted date. So
instead of displaying the hour in 24hour format, it was zero-prefixed. Fixed. ;) Article posted dates should now be
correct wherever they're displayed.
- Removed extraneous <br /> tag between article header and content.
- Adjusted top header title/banner area by removing unneccesary color gadients. Looks a little crisper and refined
now.
- More code cleanup to be friendlier to non-gui browsers (check out 'user mode' sometime in Opera). The
culmination of tweaks and adjustments to the html has reduced the total page footprint to just 43k.
- Went to w3c html validator again and whittled down the 380+ errors to a
more manageable 83. These are mostly the result of url strings for other sites being non compliant. Considering using
htmlentities() to fix this in the future.
- Added 'shortcut icon' link tag to the layout.
- Added an 'alternate' RSS feed tag to the layout.
- Added a new link at the bottom of the front page or article view to see page in printer friendly format. This
means that yes, the entire front page can be viewed in the much lighter (bandwidth-wise) printer friendly format.
- Rmoved the recent posts sidebar from the archive page.
- Added a month navigator bar at the top of month view in the archive page.
- Added more article entries to the database from the html version of the back issues. We have news going back
earlier than 2000, but most of it is not dated properly. The entries that are dated will be added slowly as I get to
them.
- Upgraded the forum from version 2.0.4 to version 2.0.6.
v1.7.4 (13 october 2003)
- Fixed a bug in DisplayNews that affected how dates were displayed. Now it no longer converts explicitly to GMT
date.
- Minor cleanup of the Printer Friendly page.
- Created an 'inactive journalist' user title, in preparation for incoming archived stories from html format to
database.
- Fixed serious cookie issue with the forum. Seems it was assuming www.beosjournal.org as the doamin, although it's
actually forum.beosjournal.org. Fixed by creating the cookie for the entire beosjournal.org domain instead.
- Looking into fixing email handler so it sets more spam-killer friendly headers, after many complaints forum
notifications were being tagged as spam. phpBB problem, but should be fixable.
v1.7.3 (30 september 2003)
- Split the forum box into two related boxes, one for login the other of recent posts.
- Created a new Recent Headlines box, which uses _ARCHIVE_RECENT_COUNT_ days of previous headlines
- Removed the posting icon from in front of each headline, replaced with a print icon. Made headline linked to
article id.
- Archive section; each month is linked to show its headlines, and months of the year listing is in place.
- Added a 'Tracker' section, linked to from the navigator bar up top, and the footer text below.
v1.7.2 (27 september 2003)
- Finally started on the archive code backend, and made some serious headway. Year view, month view, and recent
entries are in place.
- Archive section aims to feature downloadable zipfiles for year and each month of stories from the database.
- Using grep (love this tool), weeded out and replaced all references to BeOSJournal, and image url specific
instances, in preparation for new domain.
- Added two syndication feeds: RDF & RSS, available as recent.rdf and recent.rss respectivelly.
- Created a 'projects' subdomain, and prepared the config file to handle domain specific information in a more
agnostic way. Changing one file should be all that is necessary in the future to flip the site over to new name.
v1.7.1 (20 august 2003)
- Updated the forum box with a new format. Users are now listed on top and their ID number shown for quick access.
This new format presents more of the topic title as well.
- Used the glyphs to further seperate the posting lines, for clarity.
- Made sure the headings were colored the same as the rest by using _COLOR_FONT_HEADINGS_ defines. This makes
updating everything that uses this define a snap, for future user preferences.
v1.7.0 (17 august 2003)
- Did quite a lot of small but important changes for this revision, so bumping it from 1.6.4 to 1.7.0 makes sense to
me. It was one of those "do it all in one go, don't stop working till it's ready, kind of evenings"...
;)
- Finally went "live" with the news database. There should be no appreciable difference for our front
page.
- Created a fresh new color scheme, and updated the layout of the site slightly.
- Moved the MyJournal and BeCommunity boxes from the sidebar to top header.
- news.beosjournal.org is working, and is redirected to automatically from the initial front page entry point.
- Gotta give a shout out to RikkiRocket for his fine work on the new TBJ logos. (for each section of the site.)
Thanks bro!
- Changed the navigation labels to home, archive, forum, and removed BeOS In Action, User Central sections for now.
Must think on how to do this properly before proceeding.
v1.6.4 (27 june 2003)
- Created a screenshots page for what's happening in the backend.
- Not many changes in past two days since I'm still thinking about some serious issues and how to handle them
properly before proceeding... Working on the driver document translation project at the moment to take my mind off
technical details.
v1.6.3 (25 june 2003)
- fixed multi-page navigation for news stories, top and bottom.
- news entries now display entirely in the middle of the layout, as they should. considering print option soon.
v1.6.2 (24 june 2003)
- more work in the administration area. cleaned up news editor to display properly in non-css browsers. (small ugly
table hack. ick)
- applied same layout to 'add new story' page as well. both areas should display reasonably well in net+. (Admin
section)
- fixed rollover display bug in main news admin page. (Admin section)
- found a typo bug.. fixed... apparently trying to display a non-existant variable named 'yesr' won't work..
wonder why.. ;)
- moved more configuration settings into global config.php file, out of layout and out of news index.php. news and
www pages should look similar, and eventually the same as things progress.
- http://news.beosjournal.org is now live, sorta... it's always been
displaying the stories we're using to test the system with, and now, it's been given the most recent layout changes
that www had.
- removed extraneous <div> tags from news display, so that they're a little more net+ friendly...
v1.6.1 (24 june 2003)
- Some minor work in the backend.. took care of cleaning up the php code in the master layout file
- decided to move to a seperate color file for each upcoming major section of tbj. moved colors out of the messy php
switch() and into their own individual files.
- deleted the small graphics that were at the left side under muscle server listings. (BeOS R5 Personal Edition,
9/11 banner, beunited banner).
- reduced brightness of donation link, indicator text.
- made BeCommunity, MyJournal, Latest BeBits, and TBJ Must Haves boxes match existing color and fonts.
- started work on a seperate links page.
v1.6.0 (23 june 2003)
- started on this document. ;)
